This Ten Greatest Worldwide Releases of 2025
The past twelve months have offered a rich tapestry of international sounds that expanded horizons. Presenting a selection of ten remarkable albums that shaped the year in music.
Number Ten: The Percussionist Sarathy Korwar – There Is Beauty, There Already
A continuous, 40-minute suite of repetitive percussion may not appear the easiest musical proposition. Yet, Indian percussionist and producer Sarathy Korwar converts this persistent pulse into a strangely alluring album. Directing an ensemble of three drummers, Korwar creates a complex percussive dialect across the record's ten sections. The album channels the phasing techniques of Steve Reich combined with Indian classical phrasing, all anchored in the recurrence of a ongoing, pulsing figure. Over its duration, this refrain evokes the trance-inducing cycles of ritual music, luring the listener further into Korwar's singular percussive realm.
Number Nine: The Lebanese Artist Yasmine Hamdan – I Forget, I Remember
Coming off an long absence, Lebanese vocalist and composer Yasmine Hamdan returns with a melancholy collection of songs. She expands on the Arabic-language, dub-tinged aesthetic that cemented her status in the region's indie music scene since the nineties. Hamdan's voice is quiet and thoughtful, delivering soft melodies atop the bowing strings of a track like Hon and the rumbling trip-hop groove of Vows. For more upbeat numbers such as Shadia and Abyss, she adopts a wavering, yearning vibrato over electronic lines with North African flavors and skittering electronic percussion. The production is sparse and subtle, yet this simplicity creates the ideal canvas for Hamdan's deeply felt lyricism to resonate. It is that justifies the long anticipation.
8. Debit – Slowed Down
Mexican producer Debit has a knack for haunting reworkings of historical sounds. On her latest release, Desaceleradas, she turns her attention to the 1990s variant of cumbia rebajada – a decelerated, dubby take of the rhythmic Latin American dance genre. Debit decelerates this sound even further, filtering its characteristic synths and syncopated rhythm via veils of murk and noise to produce a new, sinister rhythm. Sometimes ambient and unsettling, Debit morphs the exuberant party music of cumbia into a persistent, spectral echo.
7. The São Paulo Producer DJ K – Radio Libertadora!
Maximalism is the key term for the music of São Paulo producer Kaique Vieira, also known as DJ K. Inventing his own genre of "bruxaria" (witchcraft), Vieira layers a cacophony of sirens, explosive bass tones and shouted lyrics on top of the classic Brazilian genre of baile funk. This emulates the propulsive sound of neighborhood block parties. On his new record, Radio Libertadora!, Vieira ramps up the intensity, throwing in everything from four-on-the-floor techno beats to samples of the Islamic call to prayer into his frantic bruxaria mix. The result is a especially hyperactive and punishingly loud forty-minute listening experience. Surrender to the noise and Vieira's brash productions become strangely exhilarating.
6. Mohinder Kaur Bhamra – Punjabi Disco
Sikh devotional singer Mohinder Kaur Bhamra's 1982 album of disco music and Punjabi folk melodies is a rediscovered masterpiece. Produced by her son, music producer Kuljit Bhamra, Punjabi Disco's ten tracks present an remarkably compelling combination of the metallic sound of 1980s synthesisers and drum machines with her ornate classical Indian singing style. Electronic percussion echoes the rolling tones of the traditional drums, while synth lines parallels the classic sound of the harmonium on tracks such as Pyar Mainu Kar. Elsewhere, bossa nova rhythm comes to the fore on Soniya Mukh Tera, and Nainan Da Pyar De Gaya boasts a driving disco bass groove. It's a club-ready hybrid pioneered more than ten years before the global breakthrough of South Asian electronic music.
Number Five: Enji – Sonor
Mongolian vocalist Enji's delicate fourth album, Sonor, expands on her jazz-inflected sound to present some of her most diverse music to date. Departing from her background in traditional Mongolian "long song" singing, the record's selection of pieces travel from the soft jazz-pop melodics of slow-burning number Ulbar to the German-language narration lyrics and twanging guitar lines of Unadag Dugui. The album also includes a lively, funk-tinged cover of the 1980s Mongolian classic Eejiinhee Hairaar. Showcasing a full backing band rather than her typical setup of guitar and bass, Sonor's sound is still close, drawing the listener into the warm acoustics of her distinctive voice.
Number Four: Derya Yıldırım and Her Band – Yarın Yoksa
Drawing on the psychedelic tradition of Turkish psychedelia pioneered by groups such as Moğollar, Turkish-born, Germany-based singer Derya Yıldırım's new album with her band Grup Şimşek fuses the distinctive buzz of the amplified traditional lute with drifting Mellotron and soulful tunes. It's a retro-70s aesthetic rooted in Yıldırım's strong falsetto and shaped by producer Leon Michels' analogue tape aesthetic. But, on classic Turkish songs such as the nursery rhyme Hop Bico and 1960s song Ceylan, the group reaches lively new territory. They develop sinuous, slow-burning grooves and lifting vocals that give a fresh, quirky interpretation to the Turkish psych sound.
Number Three: The Colombian Artist Lido Pimienta – La Belleza
Gregorian chants, Eastern European folk melodies and orchestral strings all come together on Colombian-born singer Lido Pimienta's stunning fourth album. Orchestrating music for the sixty-member Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, Pimienta and producer Owen Pallett traverse everything from the Gregorian chants of opener Overturn (Obertura de la Luz Eterna) to the dramatic counterpoint melodies of Aún Te Quiero and the syncopated dembow rhythms of the brass and woodwind-led El Dembow del Tiempo. It is Pim
